


Sympathy and sulphur

by Lilliburlero



Series: Sympathy and sulphur [1]
Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson, Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1930s, Ableism, Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexuality, Caves, Claustrophobia, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/F, F/M, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Mid-Canon, Mother Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Canon, Rituals, Sexism, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-17 04:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 16,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3514607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A popular novelist and his great friend rent a house in Lynchwyck. Some things change and some things stay the same.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: period-typical sexism, homophobia and ableism. Hand injury (non-graphic), descriptions of claustrophobia and a post-traumatic flashback, mentions of suicide and suicidal ideation (not more extreme or prolonged than in canon), gratuitous Swinburne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Makioka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Makioka/gifts).



> Many thanks to Naraht for beta-reading. Any remaining errors are my own.

The intelligence that the Hazells had at last let 'Deodars' came at just the right time for the shopping ladies of Lynchwyck. Julian Fleming’s head injury and emergency surgery were exhausted: no specimen or stage prop could have been picked and polished as clean. The social life of the aircraft works and its ancillary housing estate was settling to cordial, parallel co-existence with that of the village: there had been no outrage worth speaking of for weeks. Meanwhile, Mrs Hazell’s wardrobe for her sojourn in California had been reviewed, both in her presence and out of it, but the only general conclusion reached from assessment of those brilliant modern fabrics was that it was prudent not to afford Susan Hazell undue attention. The Hazells were an old Lynchwyck family, lately risen from the yeomanry. Mr Hazell, a moderately gifted businessman who had lucratively merged his father’s engineering firm into the aircraft works, was considered to have made a considerably less advantageous union in personal life. Their only son took after his mother in conspicuous delicacy; his precipitate return from school five years before, ostensibly on grounds of ill-health, had caused more than one gentleman in the district to fix his gaze firmly on the coal scuttle and reply to his wife’s anxious, halting enquiry _perhaps in a bad house, in a bad school, in a bad time_. But young Hazell, though he had not flickered across the screens of the Gaumont Palace or the Daffodil even in as much as a second-rate short, was evidently enough of a success story to own, rent or borrow a house in Beverly Hills, and maintain his parents in it for four months. Dear Susan, though uncultivable, could not henceforth merely be patronised.

The identity of the Hazells’ tenant might have cancelled even that reserve, were it not for the manner in which it was revealed. Mrs Clare’s appearances at mid-morning marketing, though unlike the others’ not daily, were frequent enough that she could never be said to hold herself aloof. Her quiet self-containment was for the most part approved as dignified sufferance of an irregular situation; though some dissent from this view, attributing to her insufficient humility, was sometimes indulged, more often now that her lodger, Dr Mansell, a forceful woman, could be cast as evil influence. Lisa never had news to share, so there was astonishment at the gentle low-pitched laugh with which she greeted Mrs Layton’s enthusiastic rebuttal of a fantastic rumour concerning the Hazells’ let.

‘But it’s perfectly true. Mr Blaize is a friend of Rupert’s—they met in France during the war. He likes to live in the country when he begins a new novel, and finish them off in town. Rupert wrote to me asking if I knew of a house that might suit him, as he was contemplating Gloucestershire. And I did.’

All the ladies had read at least one of David Blaize’s novels, and privately they thought it queer that Rupert Clare, of whom they used the word _cosmopolitan_ to convey his air of having travelled some very great distance in a greasy railway carriage to address one as if one were a middle-ranking Nazi wanting only a little priming to become usefully garrulous, should be friends with the author of the genial comedies of manners and deliciously chilling ghost stories which they gently deprecated as quaint, undemanding interludes in their serious reading.

The Hazells duly departed and Mr Blaize’s goods, followed shortly by his tall, fair, fortyish person in a midnight-blue sports saloon, arrived a few days later. At the weekend he was observed to have a visitor, a dark-haired man of similar age, whom he treated with the unstudied intimacy of a brother, though there was no family resemblance between them. A cousin, Lynchwyck conjectured, or a brother-in-law. As Mr Blaize called successively upon his neighbours, the speculation was corrected, to some excitement, for though Mr Blaize (himself unmarried) had a brother-in-law, Mr Maddox was not he. Mr Maddox’s looks were still just crisp and vivid enough to hint the provisionality of a bachelorhood otherwise ratified by a Cambridge fellowship and a limp; the curious effect of his conditional admission to eligibility was to render Mr Blaize—rich, handsome and famous beyond the aspirations of Lynchwyck’s widows and virgins, suddenly accessible to them.


	2. Chapter 2

To her relief, Lisa found she was able sincerely and warmly to welcome Hilary Mansell back from her holiday; she had feared that a fortnight of solitude followed by a week of Rupert might have sensitised her once again to the presence of another person in the house. Hilary’s face, drawn with the stress of travel as ivory chiffon by blue tailor’s chalk, a streak of red hair plastered beneath the jawline, roused in Lisa a compassionate affection that she at first struggled to place. Later, over tea, she recognised it across almost twenty years as the sentiment with which, the prefect invariably detailed to meet unaccompanied juniors from the school halt, she would greet that term’s favourite. The recollection reminded her of the large package from Pound & Co., delivered the day before Rupert’s telegram obliterated the quotidian: she said something before she forgot again. After a momentary frown revealing it as a surprise present, Hilary merely remarked that it was a bore, but her old luggage had served her quite well.

As she stacked plates and cups on the trolley, Lisa amused herself in trying to imagine the man who had managed both to become close enough to Hilary to give her an unexpected travelling-case and maintain the belief she might approve the gesture. Admitting defeat and the possibility that the sender was not a man simultaneously, she became aware of an empty, lowered feeling, as of tobacco and coffee taken in lieu of food and sleep. At that moment Annie entered to take the trolley, offering an involved explanation for the hand-delivery of the correspondence which she produced from her apron-pocket. Half-attending, Lisa took the two envelopes with a smile—David Blaize had promised a dinner as soon as his sister could settle the date of her visit and Frank Maddox had returned from field-work at Perachora; these rigid, cream-laid harbingers bore the unmistakable mark of his gentle mischief. She went upstairs with the idea of giving Hilary hers, but for some reason hesitated without pausing her step, and went on to her own room. Returning across the landing with _Stamboul Train_ , she was startled to hear Hilary’s voice raised in a plaintive admission of nonplus.

It was horrible. A medical accoutrement remade as a starlet’s plaything; a perfectly-appointed assertion in enamel and gilt of woman’s merely decorative function. Fascinated despite herself at the opulence of it, she ran a fingertip over the powder-jar: it was cool and smooth, like effrontery. Hilary repeated her desperate request for advice. With the slightly amplified calm that was her equivalent of vocal indignation, Lisa counselled her to sleep on the matter. A minute stiffening in Hilary's bearing told her the nature of her mistake. Had Lisa’s complexion been one to admit a blush, she would have reddened deeply, not so much for the betraying pronoun but her earlier suppression of the right one.

'It's from a—grateful patient.'

Surprised that Hilary, whom she thought wholly broken into harness, should be flustered by anything related to her professional life, Lisa asked, 'Do you dislike her as much as that?'

'I was trying, till this came, not to dislike her as much as she dislikes me.'

Lisa weighed the compliment she was about to give for both fulsomeness and reserve. 'Well, I dare say it means a lot to take her pride out of pawn at the expense of yours. And after all, unless she's an exceptional woman, you can probably afford it better.'

But Hilary, still perturbed, seemed to register neither the praise nor its qualification.

'This might prove a distraction of sorts,' Lisa said, handing over the invitation. ‘A friend of Rupert’s has taken a house—the Hazells’—for the summer.’

Hilary turned it over queryingly and opened it. ‘David Blaize? _The_ David Blaize?’

‘The novelist—yes. I don’t know him well, but the impression I get is he’s both very like his books and quite unlike,’ she replied, not quite answering Hilary’s unspoken question.

‘My mother would be thrilled. I—well—the only one I’ve read is _Frederic Edwardes_. I have—nephews. But how perfectly awful.’

‘What?’

‘Well, I’ve nothing at all to wear.’

‘I have—I mean, if you don’t want the trouble of buying something specially. There was a time when I lived Rupert’s sort of life—until it became impossible—and I’ve a trunkful of relics from it. We’re of a height: there’s bound to be something that I could take in.’

Among a dozen dresses variously and comically unsuitable lay a crepe-de-chine sheath of an indeterminate hue that Lisa’s colouring turned to the smoky grey of dispersing fog and Hilary’s to soft lichen touched by pale sunlight. It wanted only a dart at the bust; Lisa pinned it swiftly and competently.

‘But I can’t—it’s very good, and you must hardly have—shan’t you ever want to wear it again?’

Lisa contemplated _it was never a good fit_ , then decided that she might hazard the honesty that would pull her face taut with unhappiness. They went downstairs together, and over coffee, she told the story of her marriage and near-divorce. Hilary responded with like confidence, and Lisa retired with the unsettling, but not displeasing realisation that the last time she had unbent with such alacrity, her interlocutor had been a schoolgirl she had met from the train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks and acknowledgments to [Nineveh_uk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Nineveh_uk/pseuds/Nineveh_uk) for remarks about the dressing case which fed usefully into this chapter.


	3. Chapter 3

David withdrew his tongue-tip from the corner of his mouth and stowed his silver propelling pencil carefully behind his left ear.

'There. Whom shall I mortally wound with that, do you think?'

Frank reached across the breakfast table to take the proffered sheet of scribbling-block. ‘Don’t ask me, old chap. You're the authority on the social manoeuvrings of the provincial Englishwoman.' He counted the names around the table plan. 'Sixteen. But how perfectly awful.'

'Simply couldn't make it any fewer. Taken on her own, for example, Mrs Layton's really rather an average person, but if you put her in a room with Mrs Lowe, she becomes a sort of Slavic witch,' David bared and gnashed his teeth in demonstration. 'Ripping copy.'

'If you weren’t so wholly sweet-natured, David, you’d be a public menace.’ Frank lit a cigarette and poured himself a second cup of coffee. ‘Who's Dr Mansell?'

'Lisa Clare's lodger. A rufous and bracing maiden of four-and-thirty. Apparently she was something special at brain surgery, and then she chucked it all up to take the practice here. Private disappointment of some sort. She'll scare you rigid.'

Frank made a mild noise of demurral. 'But not the Mr Fleming whose pleasure it is to take her in? Who is the neph—?' He tapped the head of the list.

'Son. Splendidly good-looking. Reminds me of you at his age—well, so he does, don't look at me from under your eyebrows like that—you know what I mean—which is twenty-three, but lacking your colour and energy, you know, though I daresay some of that might be put down to the convalescence. It was Dr Mansell who saved his life—oh, I do see. Is there some sort of Hippocratic rule?’

‘es oikias de hokosas an esiō, eseleusomai ep' ōpheleiē kamnontōn, ektos eōn pasēs adikiēs hekousiēs kai phthoriēs, tēs te allēs kai aphrodisiōn ergōn epi te gunaikeiōn sōmatōn kai andrōōn, eleutherōn te kai doulōn, you mean?'

‘ _Swank_.’

'I don’t think it _quite_ applies. But it might be rather tedious for both of them, if he feels inclined to gratitude.’

‘Or a second opinion, God forbid. Lowe's his doctor. Give it here—' Frank did so and David scratched with his pencil. ‘I say, you don’t mind, do you? I was going to give you Miss Abbott—she was at Newnham a few years ago, you see, but she’ll still be on your other side—’

‘Not a bit. Taking in interchangeable spinsters is what the good Lord put my sort on earth _for_. I say, we’d better get a move on if we’re to fit in a round before Margery’s train gets in.’

David glanced at the chimney-piece clock. ‘Jove, so we must.’ He bounded around the table and dropped his hands lightly on Frank’s shoulders. ‘Is it four strokes I give you these days, my dear, or six?’

Frank twisted in his chair and replied, brisk as liniment, ‘You give me absolutely nothing of the sort, Blaizes.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frank quotes the Hippocratic Oath: 'Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.'


	4. Chapter 4

The cool dull weather gave way to heavy rain towards the middle of the month. The morning of David Blaize’s dinner party dawned rinsed and scoured, but by early evening the glass was already beginning to rise. The Laytons and the Lowes arrived simultaneously at quarter to seven—the former couple holding stubborn beliefs about the immutability of the dinner hour of their youth, the latter in habitual anticipation of a panoply of delay, none of which ever materialised. Mrs Herrick could do nothing about her brother’s table plan, which had placed only that hapless bachelor Mr Dent between the adversaries and himself in a ringside seat, but for the time being she carried away Mrs Layton—a competent pianist who became sensitive and attentive only in the capacity of accompanist, but then quite extraordinarily so—to look at some new sheet music. The vicar and his wife came at five minutes to eight, and were presently taken up by Frank’s interest in the twelfth-century font and fragmentary fifteenth-century rood-screen; the Abbotts, father and daughter, followed shortly, forming with the Lowes and Mr Layton such an eager and resistless circle about David that his youthful incapacity for public speaking overcame him. He was relieved by the entrance of Dr Mansell in a close-cut grey-green gown and Mrs Clare in deep, becoming burgundy. Tony Dent, pitted face blushing the same shade as Lisa’s dress, trailed them, oil on his shirtfront and mud to the calf: they had picked him up when, his car having irrevocably broken down, he had just resolved to undertake the two remaining miles on foot. David applied his warmth and geniality to making Tony feel at ease despite his dishevelled condition, with the result that his introduction of Frank to Dr Mansell, whom he was to take in, was immediately succeeded by Withers’ announcement of Mrs Fleming and Mr Fleming.

David, knowing Frank’s susceptibilities, was better prepared than he for the effect of Julian Fleming in evening dress. Nonetheless, Frank’s slow, self-mastering inhalation, his long blink showing eyelids indigo with a lifetime’s sufferance of periodic insomnia, touched David as if on an open and weeping lesion—he struggled not to flinch. Frank’s opening eyes caught David’s in helpless apology, and flicked away to engage Hilary Mansell on the subject of Stockholm City Hall—fruitlessly, for she was fixed upon the approach of Elaine Fleming, regal in royal blue.

She offered a hand and a greeting to her host and nods of acknowledgement to the rest.

‘Mrs Fleming, may I introduce my great friend Mr Maddox to you? He has just returned from Greece—from a dig near Corinth.’

‘How do you do, Mr Maddox?’ Frank returned the bow. ‘Do you like it there?’

Frank thought the tense of the verb odd, but replied simply, ‘I do very much, but it’s my work. We’re excavating a sanctuary of the goddess Hera.’

Mrs Fleming’s mouth tautened, as if the very mention of that jealous queen were indecent. Frank, who had been about to add that it was reputed the burial-place of Medea’s sons, substituted a banality about the climate.

‘I’m sure it was. Mr Maddox, this is my son Julian.’

Frank looked boldly into the long grey eyes—exactly the colour of the mother’s, he noted—and felt the chill draught from the treacherous cisterns at the Heraion come up to meet him.

‘Mr Fleming,’ David said very casually, ‘will you take Miss Abbott?’ That small, rounded person, who had chosen to emphasise her indistinct resemblance to a wagtail chick with a neckline of yellow feathers, looked at her shoe-tips. Frank, possessing both considerable personal vanity and unusually accurate self-perception, thought of David’s comparison of young Fleming’s looks to his own— _absurd_ —and understood for the first time what women meant when they said a man was _too handsome_. Then David was presenting his arm to Mrs Fleming; Frank turned to offer his to Hilary Mansell, and doing so, was astonished to see he had followed the trajectory of Julian Fleming’s gaze.

* * *

**Grape fruit**

‘Thank you, Vicar. I should love to—but _not_ the Well-Tempered Clavier, if you please—’

‘Whyever not?’

‘When we were children David and I used to sing silly words to it, and I’m afraid I always fluff it with laughing— _sat down on a tack—'_

‘ _—and said Waow!_ There’s a tack for him in every schoolroom in England, Mrs Herrick—’

**Consommé portugaise**

‘Always, if I can possibly afford it. As near the Arctic Circle as I can manage.’

‘I’m afraid my temperament runs quite the other way. Happiest when the thermometer on the Air Ministry roof touches eighty, especially if there’s a chance of sea-bathing. Childe tried to persuade me to a busman’s holiday at Skara Brae this year.’

‘And you _refused_?’

‘Well, it interests me. I’m properly an epigraphist—but there are the carved stone balls, have you heard of them? They suggest that the Platonic solids were known to Neolithic man, which is rather ripping, don’t you think?—but they’ll still be there when—well, when it's a bit more difficult to get oneself under a kippering sun.’

 **Filets de sole Louise**

'—Tranter’s in the Treasury—he knows a frightful lot about economics, at which I’m an utter dunce, but then he can never tell when his dialogue sounds like robots. I say, I usually go to visit him in town, but he’s coming down here next month because—well, you know, the business in the spring and all that—’

‘It _is_ nice to see you out and about and looking so well—’

‘—he’s quite Left; not as much as you, Lottie, but I think you might quite get on—’

‘Oh, _Julian_. I know you mean well but—don’t. Please don't. Of course I’ll come for tea, though—’

**Poulet en casserole**

‘—and, oh yes—he quite refused to countenance summer-time—he said that the time that won Trafalgar was quite good enough for him—so we were always an hour out. Anyway, where was I?—the bag was fixed up with newspaper, so of course the balls came out and rolled down into the Cam—and he had a little towel in his black leather bag—the one with all the labels and the bottle labelled _Poison_ —against that very eventuality. So when I had climbed out of the river—’

‘Mr Blaize—you can’t ask me to believe—’

‘—Mrs Fleming, do you give me the lie?’

‘No indeed—’

‘—and asked me to play croquet according to his new scheme—’

‘—with upside-down flamingos as mallets, doubtless—’

‘No—what extraordinary ideas you have. And cruel, or I'd suggest you write them down. No, with one ball—’

**Glace vanille**

‘Doesn’t Mrs Fleming look _happy_?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so—relaxed.’

**Tartlettes de Merlûche**

‘—it’s such _folly_ , quite apart from anything else. I—I—it makes me quite speechless.’

‘I'm afraid, Miss Abbot, I’m instinctively for anything that might preserve another generation from what ours went through. Though I'm coming to think it can't be done, not indefinitely. But it’s somewhat unbecoming to say so when one knows one shan’t have to go oneself. Or even send a—son.’

‘You’ve done your bit.’

‘Not, actually. _During_ the war all right, but in fact it was rather an ordinary accident. A very surly Brough HTT threw me.’

‘Your modesty does you credit. But your disingenuousness cancels it out.’

‘What?’

‘My dear Mr Maddox, have you heard that 'Deodars' is let at last?’

‘I don't—oh. How very hot-making. But—we—I—David is—but I’m _much_ too old—’

‘Forty-four. For a man, only in the middle of things. The matrons of the parish have done their research. And the MC.’

‘You seem intent on provoking me into discourtesy, my dear.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘I didn’t mean to sound rebuking. But I could hardly say that whatever the difference between the sexes on the point, you’re barely on the fringe of the dark wood by any standard.’

‘You just did. I suppose it’s simply that most people my age don’t know they’re alone in it. And I do.’

‘You mean you—’

‘—look, I’m frightfully sorry—Mrs Fleming is getting up—’

‘But we haven’t had cof—’

‘Welcome to Gloucestershire, Mr Maddox.’

***

Frank scrambled to his feet, this unexpected (and not unwelcome) astringency driving momentarily from his mind how much, and how guiltily, he had been looking forward to the closing of the gap created by Miss Abbott’s departure. Julian Fleming had an attractive and fluent voice—unfair, really: with that face, he should by rights bray like an ass—but now he spoke with a considered modulation, too low for any of the other men to catch, but perfectly audible to Frank.

‘Lottie’s really quite a gentle person. Very intelligent. But she lost someone she cared for—in Spain. Her people didn’t trouble to hide the fact they thought she’d had a lucky escape. As, actually, she had. Turns out the fellow left another woman to mourn him. And a little boy two years old.’

Touched, Frank suppressed a smile at the traces of rehearsal and calculation in the delivery.

‘Poor girl. It doesn’t make it any easier.’

'The worst of it is you can't offer the sympathy and friendship you'd like. I don't doubt her mother developed some tactical indisposition tonight.'

'Already engaged to stay with her sister, I think David said. Light?' Frank held his gaze over the flame. 'That aspect of social life has me in full flight to the SCR.'

'Oh, I don't know—' Fleming murmured, looking like someone who caresses dogs as a rule, but isn't sure that this one won't make a nuisance of itself if encouraged. 'At one time I'd have found it useful to observe, but that's all over now.'

Unreasonably irritated by the combination of rebuff and provocation, Frank said stuffily, 'At the same time, the proper study of mankind is man, and all that.'

‘Is it?’ Fleming said, quizzically engaged. ‘I mean, is that what you do? On a dig?’

Frank frowned. ‘Could scarcely be more so, could it? The sanctuary of a goddess no-one believes in any more?’

‘I mean, don’t you ever feel touched by something?’

‘Yes—I suppose; in both senses. Votive inscriptions get me: especially the humbler sort.’

‘Are there caves there?’

‘At Perachora? Not caves. Cisterns, though. Very deep and rather dangerous. There’s always one fearful muggins who finds them irresistible and gets lost for the afternoon.’

‘ _Do_ you?’

‘Mm. Water’s my thing. I’m not a scholar of irrigation systems or anything. I just like it. The surroundingness of it.’

‘There’s a place near here you must see. I’ll take you if you like—and—Blaize, if he fancies it.’

‘Oh God, no—not if it’s a cave you mean. David had to be dug out of a shell hole once. He can’t abide going underground. Even the Tube.’

‘Only you, then?’

Frank glanced up the table towards David, who at that moment proposed joining the ladies. He took a shallow, perilous breath.

‘Only me.’


	5. Chapter 5

‘We shall pay for that evening of dissipation, you know,’ said Lisa, flicking off her pumps with her toes. ‘I believe Mrs Fleming is planning a return engagement, and I’m not so sure that my brush with the King’s Proctor is enough to let me off any more.’

Hilary turned from the hob in the recess—in a giddily undergraduate humour she had asked Lisa into her sitting-room for cocoa—and remarked, ‘I can’t imagine they throw much of a party.’ She wondered dimly what had prompted her to choose the plural pronoun.

‘Deathly. But she was more outgoing tonight than I’ve ever seen her. I didn’t know she could sing.’

‘Come not near our fairy queen—’ Hilary quavered uncertainly, pouring hot milk. ‘And do you know, I don’t think her son did either. Did you see? He looked flabbergasted.’

‘Really? I wasn’t paying attention. David and Margery have the rarest social gift on earth, I think—it’s unquestionably _organised fun_ that they go in for, except somehow it doesn’t have every half-civilised person in the room positively cringing.’

‘Mrs Herrick’s certainly charming, isn’t she?’

‘You’ve no idea. She taught me, you know. Maths and music, when I was fifteen. Only for a year, then she left to get married.’

‘But didn't you say—’ Hilary sat down heavily in the armchair on the opposite side of the fire.

‘Well, Rupert knew David _first_. And it was only at one of his parties—to mark the publication of _Nigella in Norfolk_ , I think—that I met her again. Did you have a _word_ , at school? We said _rave_.’

Hilary winced. ‘ _Pash_. I used to hate the thought that was what I had, though, if you see.’

Lisa nodded, sipping. Hilary saw her as a prefect, listening with unobtrusive sympathy to a fourth-former whose father mightn’t be able to afford next term’s fees.

'Her name was Edith,' Hilary continued, 'Edith Keith. She was three years ahead of me—Head Girl when I was in the Fifth. I'd been reading Pater and Wilde—still a bit unspeakable then, for girls at school, at any rate. The masculine pattern seemed preferable to soggy emotionalism, and I thought because I had some intellect and ambition, I must have less of woman in me, though I never actually _felt_ so. My parents didn't help: they're of the generation—well, of Wilde, or not much younger—and they found me a bit unnatural. Anyway, I contrived somehow to make an energetic and sententious English schoolgirl into a sort of Alkibiades and Diotima combined. She _was_ lovely: tall and fair, with heavy, almost Archaic features. High and solitary and most stern. Well, until she’d start talking about _esprit de corps_ or something. But I did my best to ignore that.'

'It sounds tremendously rarified. Not the _esprit de corps_. Your bit of it.'

'Oh, it was. It was a terrific relief to discover I could get along with men if I chose, all the same.'

'Until I met Rupert, I didn't think I could. I can't say it bothered me unduly; I had a fairly decent time at school, by firmly taking on plenty of wholly desultory responsibility. They didn't mind what you did, as long as you didn't _schwärm_ —in fact, I'm not sure they knew there was anything else to do. So I suppose I did rather a lot. And I _always_ thought we could safely leave Plato to the chaps. At first, with Rupert, I was almost nonplussed—but in the end, it turned out to be non-negotiable: we’re one another’s person, and that’s it. It’s just that in the love we have there’s no—everydayness—'

Hilary felt herself seized by a daimon of recklessness. She said, almost involuntarily, ‘Do you wish there were?’

‘We tried—oh. Do you mean that?’

Hilary wondered if she did. She looked out of the uncurtained french window at dark branches, a moon too clouded to silver them. ‘Yes, yes—I do.’

Lisa stood up. She put down her cup on the chimney-piece and trailing her fingers along it, regarded Hilary tenderly, inflexibly.

‘I wanted to make sure. You go up. I’ll follow in a moment.’

‘May I kiss you before I go?’

Lisa smiled. Her skin and lips were improbably, uncannily soft, but not yielding, as Hilary had expected—had she done as much as _expect_? She had never realised how strong she was.

In her room Hilary took off and hung up her borrowed dress, removed with cold cream what traces of makeup remained after a night grown close again, and brushed out her hair. If she had been going to bed with a man, she might have considered a nightdress—perhaps the one Edith had given her for the birthday before that ridiculous row over the double-booked cottage in Kirkcudbrightshire had wrought a coolness between them, and which she had never worn. But for some reason she did not think to make herself _attractive_ for Lisa. It was all the more curious, then, that when Hilary had unfastened thirty-seven claret-coloured buttons and Lisa had stepped out of her underclothes and unknotted her hair, she thought she might more than glut herself on simply gazing at Lisa’s smooth, saltcellarless neck and shoulders, the deep indent of her waist, the puckered pouches on her belly and rippling stretch-marks on her breasts, the gibbous, dimpled swell of her haunch. But that reflection would come later, with morning and solitude; Lisa had the skill and experience to put a stop to thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song sung by Elaine and company after dinner is R.J.S Stevens' [setting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMQMCH6A_r0) of 'Ye spotted snakes.'
> 
> 'High and solitary and most stern': W.B. Yeats, ['No Second Troy'](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179967).


	6. Chapter 6

Oh, God, thought Julian to himself, I hope it rains. There had been an extraordinary run of hot, thundery days at the beginning of the month, but the last few had remained obstinately fair. If it stayed like this, there would be a sedate walk and a picnic tea— _dear, you can’t possibly spend an afternoon like this down a hole!_ —and he, Edwardian-gentlemanly, would not think to plead occupational interest with a lady.

By lunchtime, small, angry clouds had gathered over the hills—there was some hope. His mother had saved the post to read at table: two letters for her, a card from Lavenham, in Tangier: an innocuous picture of a courtyard fountain with a burnous-clad figure squatting beside it, but the fortunately hieroglyphic reverse would require tactful paraphrase, and as for tone—a crisp Leslie Howard should do it.

‘What an exotic postcard, dear. Is it from someone you knew at Oxford?’

‘Yes, George Lavenham—I don’t think you ever met. He’s in Morocco—’

‘How interesting. What does he say?’

‘Well, a bit of it’s about politics, the Spanish war, you know—lots of tourist touts—all the women are veiled—the men—both Moors and Spaniards are healthy-looking and well-built—poverty not extreme by oriental standards—’

‘It sounds horrid. But I daresay for a young man it’s exciting.’

‘Yes—he’s enjoying himself tremendously—what about yours?’

‘—just acceptances for Friday week—the Laytons and the Vicar—’

There was a sudden spatter, as if thrown by a vigorous hand, against the dining-room window—just a bird, or, no—it was; rain! Julian offered up silent thanks.

‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘was that rain? How vexing. We shan’t have a walk at all—’

‘It would have been very soft underfoot in any case—’

‘Perhaps I should telephone—’

‘It would be a shame to put it off entirely. I say, Frank Maddox was curious about Mott’s Cave, and I offered to show him around it—’

She looked down at her cold chicken and salad. Julian pressed on hastily, ‘I might do that—and then we could join you and Mr Blaize for tea?’

‘I wonder that he should care for it. His field is Ancient Greece, is it not? It would be regrettable if you were to impose your eccentricities on a visitor.’ But her voice did not have in it the authentic note of prohibition.

‘He nearly went to the Orkneys this summer to look at something Neolithic—I think troglodytes are a bit of a side-interest of his—’

Looking up, she made a noise of disapprobation, but it seemed directed principally at those shadowy primitives for their poor judgement in electing to be born into so squalid an epoch.

‘So I might, then—you shouldn’t mind—’

‘Well, it’s really not for me to say. It's not that I disapprove of the friendship—he’s a nicely _definite_ person, and you need more of that sort of influence. But I think someone spending so much time studying the manners and habits of the pagans is apt to become inured, at least—even perhaps a little unchristian himself—’

‘He’s quite a churchman, in fact. I think he wouldn’t actually mind if the Vicar went in for a few more thuribles and chasubles and whatnot—’

He saw he had misjudged rather badly, and his spirits shrank. ‘Please don’t be flippant, Julian.’

She rang for the sweet and opened a conversation, suitable for the maid’s ears, about the flower-arranging roster in St Leonard’s. He felt a familiar abandonment, as if he had been dallying in a shady, sun-dappled copse, dozed off against a tree, and woken to find the sun setting and all around him grown twisted and sinister. It depressed him, as always, but on this occasion it could not be otherwise; it was, in its way, even auspicious. After gooseberry fool, he excused himself, went out to the MG in the garage, and set off to fetch his severe and loving-kindly guide, who would lead him to the earthly paradise, whenceforth she should come, to scold and bless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lavenham's reflections on Tangier (including that on the physique of the male inhabitants) are nabbed from George Orwell's [Morocco diaries.](https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/tangier-10938/)


	7. Chapter 7

‘We’ll have it to ourselves; they do conducted tours, but only three days a week. Mrs Mott would press a leaflet on me when she saw I had you along, though. Here. It’ll drive you scatty, don’t read it. I say, I think we might have to walk from here: it’s a bit claggy.’

‘I’m fairly waterproof.’ They crossed a field towards the mossy flank of a hill, into which hands of the preceding century had cut a rough arch. Julian opened the inner door and reached up inside the lintel to turn a switch.

‘Ripping. The womb of nature and perhaps her grave, eh?’

‘I’ll go down first and hold the ladder: it’s wobbly.’

Bracing the ladder with hand and foot, Julian averted his eyes so as not to witness any unseemly, maiden-auntly tussle with the wide-spaced rungs. Maddox looked at him enquiringly as he offered a hand down, but took it in one as rough and dry as a labourer’s, though cleaner-kept. Julian caught his breath: the cracked callus was unexpectedly interesting in texture.

They edged through the fissure into the cave itself. Julian opened his hands as if presenting some gift too large—or living—to wrap in brown paper. ‘There are bigger ones nearby—more ostentatious. But this is my favourite.’

‘Oh, gorgeous.’ Maddox said in an ecclesiastical mutter. ‘Like petrified monsters—one imagines they’ve crawled gibbering up from the abyss, teeth like scalpels, ravening for flesh—and through a postern gate in time itself—and,’ he snapped his fingers—the hard, sharp noise bounded around the vault above their heads—‘fossilised! Just before they tear you sinew from bone—goodness, I am sorry. I’ve always had a bit of a taste for the fantastic. Since I was a very little boy.’

‘No, I like it too. Not so much monsters with me, though. Do you know a story called “The White People”?’

‘The Machen thing with the poisoned girl and the Green Book? Certainly. I misspent quite a bit of my youth on such stuff. I think there are _nymphs_ here. Waiting to step out from among the rocks and dance Troy Town—’

Julian returned Maddox’s ingenuous grin, but this cheerful delectation was not quite right; he needed somehow to enforce ceremony, or it would all be for nothing.

‘Come on, there’s more. Careful how you go—there’s a steep slope just beyond the bend—’

Maddox gave a gratifying gasp at the sight of the pool. He looked back over his shoulder; the required fervency and hunger entered his dark eyes, hollowed his cheeks. 

'Imagine if one could bathe in it,' Julian said.

Maddox nodded tersely, once, as if self-slaughter were a friend of a friend whom he barely cared to salute in the street. ‘Your heart would stop. Do they know how deep it goes?’

‘No—in ’29, I think it was—’ Julian told him about the drought which had revealed the lower cave mouth. For some time—Julian, in a state of agitation that could as easily make little of long as _vice versa_ , did not notice how much—Maddox explored happily.

‘I say, it’s a throne. May I, do you think?’

Julian hesitated. He felt a chill in his belly and the small of his back, understanding why the Elizabethans thought the liver a seat of passions, and almost made some excuse—it was treacherously slippery and sharp, they must be getting back—but he had not come so close to miscarry now. ‘I think you _must_. It’s important.’

The titanian Chair made Maddox, who was of no more than the middle height, look small, but not in the least absurd or diminished. Resting his forearms on the ribbed rocks to either side of the hollow, he became what he had been brought here to be: virile as Poseidon, crooked as Hephaestus, harsh as Dis. His lips stretched in a cruel, glamorous smile; Julian saw his soul invested with a power which he had voraciously desired and which he had accepted without thought of evasion. And yet it wanted something; drawn back ineluctably to his first time in the cave, Julian knew what it was—though had someone suggested it only seconds before he would have dismissed the notion as unutterably tawdry.

‘Wait there a moment.’ He stepped quickly over to the column which hid the switch, and flicked it.

‘Good Lord! How magnificently _lurid_!’ Maddox exclaimed. ‘It looks rather like the theatre-lighting designs that were going irredeemably out of fashion when I was about sevent—’

Maddox yelped and delivered himself of what Julian sensed was a rare obscenity, but nonetheless a vicious one, into a darkness glaring, total and stunning. An echo, diabolically distorted, repeated _—king Christ—king Christ_.

‘You ass, Fleming. You’ve blown the fuse. Don’t move; you’ll fall in and drown—’

‘—I shan’t—damn, so I have. The switches are dead. I might have known the wiring wouldn’t bear—

‘For God’s sake. Hang on—’ He heard a shuffling jingle as Maddox searched his pockets.

A diffuse, pale yellow ring of light appeared; Julian thought for a giddy moment he’d brought it into being with his astounded blink.

‘You’ve a torch—’

‘—a flask of water, and two bars of chocolate. I’m only amazed that you _haven’t_ , you cretinous boy. Come here.’

Julian followed the dot of light across to the Chair: underlit, Maddox’s face leered out of the dark, a hideous Pan. When he was about five feet away, the torch shut off abruptly, succeeded by the disbelieving pause native to power cuts.

‘What—’ Julian cried. ‘Don’t say the battery—the bulb—’

‘I thought,’ Maddox said, sleekly arrogant, ‘we’d enjoy the dark while we may. Bathe in it.’

Julian understood—the anti-climax had not disrupted the observance, it was part of it. He stepped hesitantly forward and found with his foot the little promontory which served as ottoman to the Chair, and sank down onto it. He reached out and touched Maddox’s canvas-clad knee—a hard palm met and caressed his jaw, the thumb passing over his mouth. He parted his lips and closed them on the thrusting digit, sucking with infantile absorption. Grunting roughly, Maddox withdrew his thumb, raising him into a savage, rapturous kiss.

It was unendurable. On all his dozens of visits to the cave, Julian had relished the thought of the weight of rock and soil and turf piled on the vault above: now, with Maddox’s hands ranging over his back and buttocks and his tongue filling his mouth, he felt it as choking oppression. He pulled himself away with a whimper—conscious of failure mere and complete; of the miasma induced by the the year-king who had cringed from the blade, condemning his lands and line to barrenness.

‘Julian, dear boy—did I hurt you? I’d sooner die than hurt you—’ _Iron—irtue_ , mocked the echo, sounding less hollow than the empty, automatic protestation itself. Julian heard Maddox slapping his pockets for the torch, but before he could find it light scorched through the cave. Julian’s vision effloresced pink and green—he flung up his hands to his face, then remembered the fuse and pelted for the switches. In his blind rush he cannoned heavily into his companion, who had thought more quickly and moved more slowly to the same end.

In friendlier light he turned to see Maddox on all fours, and loped back, panting apologies, to give a hand.

Maddox glanced up, not mastering in time a look of abject, hateful desolation. He clenched his right fist, which leaked treacle, and mumbled, ‘Other—hand—fell—against a sharp—and cut—’

Julian awkwardly offered his left, and hauled Maddox to his feet.

‘Someone must have fixed the fuse. We’d better get moving before it happens again.’

The wound bled heavily, in the way of those to extremities; Maddox’s handkerchief was sodden before they got to the ladder. Julian offered his, to his shame, not quite clean.

Maddox flinched. His face, normally saturnine, was cheese-pale and sweating. ‘Could you bind it, please? It’ll make the climb a bit easier.’

Julian obeyed, aware of the appraising, unimpressed regard of someone who had seen battlefield first aid.

‘Thanks,’ Maddox said, clearly groping for generosity. ‘It’ll do.’

After the cave, even the sepia light of a weakly sun seemed blinding. Mrs Mott, waiting for them at the gate, looked determinedly equanimous. Neither man having contemplated his own or the other’s appearance, they both did so, finding it simultaneously, discreditably unpicturesque, to music-hall effect. At length, they explained themselves and escaped Mrs Mott’s laborious account of the cowman’s deduction of the blown fuse.

They sat for a moment in silence in the car, Maddox holding his right elbow to keep his hand aloft. ‘Look here, this is quite a little gash. I don’t want to make a fuss, but I've seen too many cases of misplaced stoicism ending in sepsis to be—I was going to say sanguine. I think it'll need a stitch or two. Could you drop me at the Cottage Hospital? We can probably telephone your mother from there—what time is it, anyway?’

It was six o'clock. Mr Blaize and Mrs Fleming had been enjoying their enforced tête-a-tête for an hour and a half.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'The womb of nature and perhaps her grave': Milton, _Paradise Lost_ , Book II, l.911.
> 
> The text of Arthur Machen's short story 'The White People' is [here](http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/whtpeopl.htm).


	8. Chapter 8

Lisa looked up, needle in hand, as the door to the sitting room swung open. Hilary’s face looked unusually crumpled and wan for the end of a day shift.

‘Hullo, darling. Are you all right?’

‘Yes—something rather queer happened—’

‘I’ll put on some tea.’

Over scalding, soothing cups and the cold collation Annie had left for Hilary’s supper, Lisa asked, ‘You still look bewildered, dear. Can you tell me, or is it something confidential?’

‘Not—not exactly. I mean, it is to do with a patient, in a way, but—I can’t see any harm in telling _you_. When you think of the things one hears and sees in a hospital in a town—I dare say at one time I shouldn’t have paid it any attention. But I suppose I’ve become a bit rustic. Anyway, it was being another day of stupendous non-event, and near the end of it—about half past six, I suppose—Frank Maddox showed up with a deep laceration to his palm. While I was fixing him up he told me that Julian Fleming had taken him to the cave at Mott’s Farm, managed to fuse whatever lighting arrangement they have down there—luckily, they’d a torch—but on the way out he’d slipped and grabbed something jagged.’

‘Poor old chap. He must feel a fool.’

‘It could easily have been worse—his right, though, which is a nuisance—’

Lisa looked at her curiously. ‘Well, that too.’

‘Unlikely to be any lasting—oh Lord, I see.’ Hilary laughed weakly, then frowned. ‘But surely not—he’s twice his—I suppose that doesn’t signify—but Blaize and he—aren’t they—?’ She stammered to a halt.

‘What a clown I am, not to have seen what must have gone on,' she resumed. 'But you see, what happened next drove that aspect of it out of my head. There were no more patients, so I tidied up, wrote up a couple of notes, got my coat from the changing room and left. The Fleming boy was still there, down in the hall. He’d left Maddox waiting in the car and it must have taken fifteen or twenty minutes for me to get ready. I probably ticked him off rather—even though it wasn’t a serious injury, there was bound to be some mild shock, just because of the circumstances—’ Hilary became slightly pink, ‘and he should have run him home straight away to hot tea and aspirin—and he just stared at me, all agog. Very odd, to see all that beauty gone slack and imbecilic. Bernini could have done it well. He said, in a whisper, but unmistakably—didn’t Lottie Abbott say he’d been in OUDS?—’

Lisa nodded. ‘Mm. I believe at one time he thought of it as a career, but nothing ever came of it. Lack of application rather than of talent, I think.’

‘—he said, “You came after all. I didn’t fail.” And I said something like— _Whatever can you mean? I was here all along._ And he replied, “Yes, yes, of course you were. It worked. He brought me to you.” I was speechless. Then the—I can only call it _ecstasy_ —does that sound frightfully silly?—seemed to leave him, and he looked quite normal again—well, if you can call a face like that _normal_ —and he said he was very sorry, he’d never thanked me properly for all I’d done for him, and would I like to come out for tea and a drive.’

‘Goodness. What did you say?’

‘I said I would—I was completely stupefied—at that moment I think I'd have agreed to more or less anything, just to see the back of him.’ Looking concerned, Hilary reached for her cigarettes and lighter. ‘It is all right, isn’t it, dear?’

‘Of course. As long as you want to.’

‘I’m not sure I do—I think it might be rather strained and dull, if he feels this great burden of gratitude—when really, I didn’t do a thing. Whatever will we talk about?’

‘You go to the theatre, don’t you, sometimes? Talk about that. You can always steer him into a cinema if it gets desperate.’

She drew hard on her cigarette. ‘Well, I shan’t let him take me anywhere near Mott’s Farm.’

Lisa raised her eyebrows. Hilary grinned, her former discomposure ousted by a full stomach and nicotine. ‘Not that he’s likely to—anyway, claustrophobia. Sub-acute, and I believe I should be able to control it if _necessary_ , but _not_ my idea of fun—’


	9. Chapter 9

Disconcerted by Mrs Fleming’s irritation, which seemed to mix a strong concentrate of dislike for her son with a correspondingly potent draught of concern for his welfare, David treacherously exaggerated Frank’s foibles.

‘—if he finds graffiti, your afternoon is sunk before it starts, I’m afraid. One Christmas—I was still at school, but he’d gone up, I think—he stayed with us and filled a notebook with every scratch in Baxminster cathedral—one used to find him glooming in the choir stalls over all the golden lads who had carved their initials there and were long since come to dust themselves.’

‘I rather doubt there is anything of that sort to interest him in Mott’s Cave. It has only been opened fifty years or so: if there are any—inscriptions, they’re probably vile, and committed by the mannerless living.’ 

Delightedly, David pictured her presiding over the grim tribunal of the nursery, attending gravely to Nanny's testimony concerning the felony of Scribbling on Walls. ‘Well, so were the ones at Pompeii, and now people write books about them,’ he offered carefully. He meant his next novel to demonstrate how polite convention, experienced by most people as a cogent if disagreeable monolith, was really a bric-a-brac of irrational inhibitions and atavistic impulses, and Mrs Fleming’s abrupt, unpredictable withdrawals not just from communication but almost from consciousness had been his particular study for the heroine. All that remained now was to work out how to make her _funny_. He was finding that unprecedentedly troublesome: he had grown protective of her, and could not bring himself to commit a burlesque. ‘Think how the ruffians would laugh if they knew!’

The blinds in her grey eyes stayed up, but her tone became glassy. ‘Of all the works of time, that is one I have never understood—I mean how its passage is supposed to make disgusting things unexceptionable.’

‘I don’t think it does,’ David said slowly. ‘Not if they’re really filthy. But time can reveal them as merely selfish or crass.’ He realised he was not thinking about Pompeiian excoriations. He suspected that neither was she. The clock struck five, and she began another round of deploring apology and bread-and-butter.

Unlike most people with small appetites, Mrs Fleming did not seek to overfeed her guests. Accepting another tram-ticket-sized sandwich, David became aware that he was encroaching upon the portions of the absent members of the party; opening his mouth to admit the slivers of bread and salmon-paste, he also granted ingress to the thought he had been keeping at bay since the thin red MG drew up in the lane outside ‘Deodars.’ He smelled the memory of dank earth, iron and excrement; knew he must not panic and also that deep breaths were a luxury he could not afford. Very steadily, he asked, ‘Are the Motts on the phone? It does seem unusual, perhaps we should—’

‘No. I believe they meant to have one installed this summer, to take tour enquiries, but they’re still waiting.’

‘The insolence of the Post Office and the spurns/That patient merit of the unworthy takes—’

Her trim, shapely body seemed to contract and condense. Her eyes narrowed and her mouth formed a tired, forbearing line; her weariness reminded him of someone—not someone he knew, but someone he had wanted to know: the slim gamine he had seen over the shoulder of a preposterous cocoon the night he and Bags Crabtree had gone to see 'Phyllis in Philistia'. The casual parody of ‘to be or not to be’ had wounded her in some way; how outraged she would be to know that her hurt recalled for him a theatre-bar tart glimpsed out of the corner of his eye twenty years before. It _was_ a fairly inane thing to say, David reflected, collecting himself, and would have been even if he’d come up with a telecommunications pun for the second line (which he probably would in the bath tonight). His subconscious mind had doubtless suggested it as a precautionary magic against the _undiscover’d country_ , but she would of course see it as direct, unfeeling allusion. Embarrassed, he began a line of fatuous piffle about his childhood belief that telegrams wore mackintoshes, for had you ever seen a wet one?

But, in any case, it worked: nibbling at cake, she visibly uncoiled, responding not quite in kind, for the memories she shared were of Julian’s early years, not her own. Natural enough in a mother, David supposed, but he found himself nonetheless vexed at her reticence. It was not that he lacked material for writing girlhoods: he had Margery’s, and those of the many ladies with whom he lunched, but he wanted hers in a different way and to another purpose: disinterestedly and yet absolutely. Later, when there were no more decisions to be faced, he would realise why that was; at the time, he only knew, with purblind instinct, how to elicit it. He began by speaking of Mrs Maddox, rather an old than a young mother, having given birth to her first and only son in her mid-thirties, but who had the strange gay gravity common to Frenchwomen, that made them seem ancient at nineteen and juvenescent ever after. Knowing that Mrs Fleming had a horror of inquisitiveness, he supplied the needful information as jocose afterthought.

‘—it meant a lot to me, because my mother died before I could meet her properly, you know.’

He saw in the dainty inclination of her head that he had not only her assent but her attention, and felt a tingle of warm pleasure. He told her everything he knew about the orphan of barely seventeen, ward of her great-uncle Mr Twyford (a squire of the sort popularly thought not to have survived the railway age), who had captivated thirty-year-old Rev. Blaize with quick wit and guileless mischief more than prettiness, for of the latter commodity she had none at all. David produced the scuffed, forty-five-year-old cabinet card he had carried in his pocket notebook since his father’s death.

Mrs Fleming looked up from a face like a skinned hare to see some of it—low brow, wide eyes, full ruddy cheeks—replicated to different result.

David smiled. ‘Mother’s face and Pa’s combined to make Margy and me almost tolerable, don't you think?’

‘Oh, a little more than almost, and less than quite.’ The phrase had the frangible air of someone else’s grizzled nursery quibble.

She rang for the servant, and returning to the tea table, sat down on the sofa with a satisfied exhalation. David cursed inwardly, and pitied Clara, who was clearly aware of her function as a device to curtail uncomfortable conversation and hated it. As she cleared with self-conscious despatch and Mrs Fleming chatted in a kind of rapture of insipidity, he looked down at his knees to see the open envelope pasted to the back cover of his notebook and realised he still held one card. Or rather, he did not.

When the maid had departed he drew the footstool that stood at the base of his armchair closer to the sofa. Fortunately it was a high, substantial member of its tribe; regular and vigorous exercise had preserved in him a certain youthful fluidity of movement, but he was, after all, no longer fifteen. A corollary to this concerning the sex of his interlocutor he put firmly from his mind, sat on the pouffe and leaned earnestly forward. From this supplicant position, he thought she resembled the Sistine Madonna: not, in truth, that lady as she had looked, disappointingly dewy and adolescent, when he had at last seen her in Dresden, but as she really was, in the engraving given to him by his father the summer before his last year at prep school, with the grain of chromolithography upon her skin.

It was ten to six. 

‘Should you like me to sit with you until—? he asked. 'I confess I’d like the company myself.’

She looked as if she would politely refuse, but then said, ‘Yes, thank you.’

He reached for the photograph, which she still gripped obliviously, letting his right hand follow the dominant one so that when their fingers had met in the exchange, she might, if she wished, let hers fall into it. She did. Her hands were beautiful, never a vulgar or exhibiting movement: not frail, as the near-translucent skin might suggest, but cool and firm with the practical intelligence of near-constant feminine occupation. How splendid it would be to have some trivial illness and her as one's nurse! David felt as if he’d brushed a still-reverberating bell; he could quell it with a firm, mindless friendliness, or absorb the vibrations until they ceased of their own accord.

‘Would it sound very odd if I said I envied your mother?’

‘No. I think she was a merry person when she was alive, and I’m in no doubt of her happiness now. If that doesn’t sound rather—cheek, as we used to say.’

He saw there were tears standing on her lower lids. ‘Another name for it is redemption.’ She blinked.

‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘It comes when you care for someone else’s soul more than for your own. And you can’t will it into being. That’s the hard bit to live with, isn’t it?’

He folded her hand more tightly in his. An urgent need, that he had known but rarely, rose in him, and he saw, as never before, no reason to deny it. He pulled himself up onto the sofa beside her, catching her scent: lavender and fresh lawn. The delicate cords in her neck tautened.

‘I’ve thought of telling him, so many times. Maybe the facts would save us both, since all my principles seem to have come to nothing.’

‘Perhaps if you tell me, it would help you make up your mind.’

The story was a commonplace one: the bitter, sordid fruit of self-serving duplicity meeting naïve vanity. As copy, David thought—for the habit of twenty years is not easily repressed even when one’s every fibre is set a-jangle by indignation and compassion and another thing altogether—it was only middling. One of the Victorian triple-decker females might have made something of it—Meredith might have made more.

‘It seems to me,’ he ventured, ‘that we’re back where we began. I mean,’ he moved towards her with a shy wriggle. He was close enough to feel the radiant warmth of her thigh; his body drank it in like a cup of Horlicks or Benger's Food. ‘John 15:13, roughly.’

‘I don’t think I understand. But go on.’

‘Well, you’ve thought a good deal about the O’Connell part of it, which is very horrid—it’s very nearly as bad as using force, to deceive someone as he did you. But not the other bit.’

‘What _ever_ do you mean?’ she said, uncertain and shrill, close to snapping control.

‘That—that Major Fleming thought he could will it into being, that love—that greatest love. He thought the love flowed from the sacrifice, and not the other way about. And then he couldn’t bring himself to make it, because one can’t, not without love, and he fled from his deficiencies.’

Straight-backed already, she drew herself up further with a shudder; David felt the tendons in her hand flex preparatory to withdrawal. His mind went lightning-white; he only knew that must not happen at any cost. She must not slip away as that other had, that first, when he was too small and weak to hold fast. Even his father had known her only three years and a month: his life and hers had overlapped by less than three days, and then she had left him to feel this clamourous lack until sure and certain hope were fulfilled.

‘He couldn’t,' he said. 'But I can. I mean, I do.’

‘You can’t mean—’

‘I do very much mean. If you’ll accept me. But you don’t have to say now.’

He cradled her nape in his left hand, gentling as he would a frightened horse, and stooped his head to hers. Somewhere in the house, the telephone trilled: silvery and oddly negligible.

She sprang back. ‘I’ll have to answer it. Clara does muddle the messages so.’

When she had gone, the enormity of what he had done broke upon him, dense, black and overwhelming. He had trampled upon the covenant of friendship—Plato and Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Montaigne, the beginning of the second book of Samuel lay about in granular fragments, like tempered glass when it smashes—and he had done it at the most casual behest of the impulse that in him was so puny and in Frank so potent that it was their shared lives’ work to keep it from desecrating their bond or souring their personalities. When they were very young men, Frank had been wont to say that David _would soon meet a girl and fall madly in love with her and be frightfully happy_ —he had suspected prophylactic incantation even then—but no such creature had ever presented herself, though David’s circle of feminine acquaintance was large, and contained women who far outstripped Elaine Fleming in character and accomplishment, if none in good looks. Was that all it was, then, a superficial attraction to symmetry? Cynicism laid even beauty low. _Jug jug, to dirty ears_ —David remembered the Philomela whistle he had bought to help along Bags' courtship of Ida Malcolm, and almost laughed, but the memory of Frank sardonically dubbing Philomela (and by extension her flautist) a _galeotto_ quashed the mirth cold. Frank was simply a crusted old misogynist, he thought, and had been so even at twenty-four, but for once the familiar reflection didn’t help. David knew that chastity was no more a possibility for Frank than its inverse was for him: in the last two years of the war, and for two or three afterwards, some helpless need to prove themselves quick and breathing had occasionally led them to break the barbarous law of the land in acts their great-grandfathers would have dismissed as venial, if puerile—scarcely _criminal_ —but nonetheless it did not answer, because it did not proceed from their love, and they had given it up.

Mrs Fleming—he must say _Elaine_ , he supposed—came back into the room, her expression unevenly compounded of relief, abstraction and perturbation: it made her look almost plain.

‘It was Julian—he’s at the hospital—oh, no, he's not hurt, and nothing serious. I couldn't have borne those months over again. Mr Maddox slipped and cut his hand on a rock in the cave, and it had to be stitched.’ She sat down on the sofa again, leaving a polite two feet of space between them.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I'm very glad it's no worse. Elaine—’

The articulation of her Christian name somehow caused his bulwark against jealousy to splinter and shatter, and the perverse monster swelled to possess him wholly. His propensity to see the good in people wherever he might, and the absurd where he might not, deserted him—to think that _Frank_ held himself so cheap as to let a swindler's mountebank bastard make a fool of him—well, he would put a stop to that, in the only way he could, by throwing his own body in the way.

‘David. I think we were both overwrought—I’ve never spoken of it since—since I informed the Colonel. And I’m quite sure now I never will—’

‘Of course: as you please. But—’ A caliban of despair began to tread out his coarse triumph-dance. ‘I meant what I said. Perhaps you’d like to sleep on it.’

She gasped girlishly and looked quickly down at the rings on her hands. ‘I don’t need to. I wanted to be sure—to give you a way out if it were only a fit of—pity. But since it was not—yes. You've shown me something I didn't know before—something about love. Yes, David, yes.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘The insolence of office and the spurns/That patient merit of the unworthy takes—’ and 'undiscover'd country': _Hamlet_ , act 3, scene 1.


	10. Chapter 10

The sun had almost set by the time Frank returned to ‘Deodars’.  Mr Blaize, Withers said, was in the garden room: Frank left word for him and went straight upstairs for a bath. Settling himself awkwardly in the element he liked best—Dr Mansell’s admonition against wetting the stitches had been strict, and the Hazells’ bathroom was impeccably chromium-trimmed and discommodious—he heard a soft, penetrating whistle at the door.

‘Come in!’

‘Hullo, Frank.’ David looked uncharacteristically sheepish. He waved the _Telegraph_ and, offering a prognostication for the Ashes, folded the paper away in his pocket. Frank agreed that England’s chances were almost unsportingly good.

‘How’s the hand?’

‘Throbbing rather.’ He lifted the clumsy member for inspection. David perched on the edge of the bath.

‘What happened, my dear?’

Frank told him, omitting nothing, for their compact was one of discretion rather than deceit, punctuating the account with a renewal of the hot water.

‘I’m afraid I had an unworthy thought. I assumed he’d knocked you down.’

‘Well, so he did.’

David grinned feebly. ‘What was it, do you think?’

‘Old-fashioned cold feet, I suppose—it was a rather ticklish drive home, anyway, even without the stuck-pig aspect. He kept chuntering on about what a disappointment he must be, he could never follow through. I took a good ten minutes of it before I asked him exactly how he thought that sort of self-reproach sounds to someone—like me.’

‘Oh, Frank.’

‘It shut him up. I’m not exactly proud of it. He kept me hanging about for twenty minutes after I’d been seen to at the hospital—some mysterious errand he’d suddenly remembered and that absolutely couldn’t wait a moment, unlike this b.f. here, naturally. And then he came back and said it was all fixed and how fearfully sorry he was. I don’t think the Hyacinthine outward form has translated into much experience. No earthly reason why it should, of course. I’m sorry, David. I didn’t mean to do it, for what that might be worth to you. But when I thought it had been handed me on a plate—well—’

David wrung his hands and got jerkily to his feet. ‘Don’t—don’t— _please._ I’ve done something much worse—unforgivable—I don’t know if I can even tell you. But I have to. I have to tell everyone.’

Frank knew David too humorous for sentimental hyperbole; the whole surface of his skin prickled as if nettle-stung, but he spoke with all the insouciance he could muster.

‘Impossible. I could forgive you anything. But don’t hold me in suspense. Not fair, when a chap’s in the bath.’

David squatted with his elbows on the rim of the bathtub, resting his chin in them. His eyes were pink-rimmed; he sniffed. ‘I—I—oh _hell_. I proposed to Elaine Fleming, that’s all.’

The inflexion of the babbled phrase was uncertain; Frank’s first thought was _proposed what?_ —it persisted nearly long enough for him to say it. Then his vision clouded storm-grey, misted and cleared. About a second had passed; there was, he recognised with a ludicrous, hysterical sense of belatedness, one hope left him.

‘—and she accepted.’

Frank's tears had been silent since he was four years old. He did not remember what childish mishap or disappointment had caused him to cry in the new way, but he recalled with piercing, crystalline clarity how it felt for the salt drops to come and make no sound. Shortly after, he had learned that it could only take place when one was alone, and during the war all tears ceased together: there no longer seemed anything much worth weeping over. He feared for a moment that he might now return to the red-faced, public bellowing of infancy, but it passed. David was talking. Frank got to his feet in the ungainly fashion that injury, old and new, imposed upon him.

‘— _say_ something—’

‘Pass me that towel.’

David was still talking. Frank caught occasional words as he slowly, one-handedly patted himself dry: army words, hospital words, police-court words. He dropped the towel and, using the rhetorical advantage of the naked over the clothed to do as much and as senseless damage as ever he could, remarked, ‘I think I’ve been wasting my time on you, Blaize. I should have fucked you when I had the chance, that November afternoon at school, and got it out of my system.’

David’s look of bewilderment was oddly close to that primal one. He hung his head for a moment, then looked up, fearful and in pain. ‘I’m a rotter,’ he said. ‘But I loved you.’

He turned on the ball of his foot and walked out.

Frank went to his bedroom and dressed. At a loss then, he plucked a favourite book from the shelf, but the words turned to pothooks, even though he knew them by heart, and he flung it away to fall open on the bed. He needed to get out of the house, out altogether. He tested the flexibility of his right hand: a tugging sensation was succeeded by a smarting one, but it wasn’t too bad. Withers had removed his soiled clothes, rinsed the flask and left it with the chocolate, the torch, and the other contents of his pockets on the bedside table; he stared at them for a moment in distant puzzlement, representatives of something that seemed to have taken place many months ago. He picked up the leaflet that Fleming had recommended he ignore; the prose combined orotundity and gamesomeness in proportions almost excessively typical of the genre. He let it drop on top of the abandoned book of verse, went downstairs and out to the garage.


	11. Chapter 11

Elaine selected the brown silk and laid it out. She took off her mauve lawn and washed her hands and face at the basin, thinking that she could simply walk in at the door and say, ‘I’d like to talk to you about something.’ Any preliminary circumlocution would be vulgar—and yet—he was likely to be very much astonished and perhaps upset. He had never had to share her. She found herself thinking about his parting kiss, shy and sweet but not clumsy.

She did her face to its polite minimum. She must just take the first pointer that was offered, and develop it as naturally as she could. Her mind growing errant again, she wondered if he had been engaged before—it would have been in his character to release a _fiancée_ before he went the the front, in case he came back maimed. He was the sort of man, despite having lived the London life of an author, to go clean to the girl he wished to marry— _girl_ , quotha. She was thinking like a novelette. Indeed, he had all but said as much. She grasped for the first time exactly what this enviable, desirable incorruption would mean—should she have to direct and manage things? At first propriety revolted even at the thought, but he had pressed his suit with full knowledge and full consent. Recognising the source of those phrases, she almost retched.

She buttoned the dress and vowed to herself to accept the first signal—if she refused one, she would refuse the next too. It was all too easy to get into the habit of letting oneself off. And she must be forbearing of shock, disbelief or anger—she rarely formed strong opinions, but she made firm judgements when she disapproved; she was hard in many ways, and for that very reason over-soft in other places—she remembered his emphatic embrace, which felt as if he did not know his own strength, or was expecting less yielding flesh than hers—but she mustn’t think of that. She must give him all her attention this evening, because it would be his last—she turned the emerald on her left hand three times, leaving it facing outward—as the precious embodiment of her shame.

It was not easy. He was skittish like that terrible horse, now, thank goodness, sold: unhealthily elated beneath the profuse apology. She had gone to considerable trouble to suppress her own excitement after an uncommonly stimulating afternoon; it irritated her that he seemed to have made no effort to do the same after one which, despite its share of event, could scarcely have been as momentous. Very consciously, she practised Blaizean charity: seeing someone injured, however slightly, and having to take him to the hospital where he himself had—that could not have been easy—but she ended by increasing her irritability, thinking how very fragile was this postwar generation, which brought her in turn to a hope that the crisis in the Sudetenland might be resolved without—

‘Are you quite well, Mother?’

‘Yes, of course, dear. I was just thinking. Is there any coffee left?’

‘Yes, it’s still quite hot.’ He poured. ‘I say, do you really not mind about my missing tea? I thought you might be quite put out.’

Now, she thought. Now. She drank coffee, framing it in her head: _of course I was worried, and it was most inconvenient, but in fact it was the occasion for a very happy—_

But he was saying something about Dr Mansell, of whose good sense and good breeding Elaine could not translate her abstract approval into concrete practice. It was not that she held foolish ideas of feminine delicacy, she considered, bringing unwontedly to mind that common person who had _come to the neighbourhood for the health-giving countryside air_ , and had actually asked Elaine to call on her—but Dr Mansell lacked—oh, it was so hard to put into words: lightness, imagination, _poetry_ ; and as for her landlady—

‘—so it is all right, then?’

‘What’s all right?’

‘You’re day-dreaming terribly—don’t jump out of it; you look just like a gorgeous little Watts I once saw at a house-party at Crabbet Park—Blunt’s twenty-first, do you remember, two years ago last Easter—on the turn of quite a small staircase—’

‘Don’t be fanciful, Julian. What were you asking me?’

‘Oh. Dr Mansell—if she might come to tea? I feel I never did quite thank her properly—’

‘My dear, I took care of that while you were in the nursing home—but yes, of course, I’ll write her a note tomorrow—’

‘—as it happens, I’ve already—well, she fixed Maddox up, you see, so—’

‘Very well, though I wish you might pay a little more attention to the distinction between a becoming freedom of manner and actual defiance of convention—you’ve been down quite long enough to acclimatise yourself to the different mentality of people in the country. How _is_ Mr Maddox? I understand he was not badly hurt?’

‘I thought I told you. Not at all. Just a few stitches—’

‘And when does he go up to the university again?’

She felt a giddiness which was not quite of this world, like the moment at her first Meet when instead of following the Field through the gate Bandsman had taken a notion to hunt the fox all by himself, and jumped the Bourne—the earth’s plummet, a glister of wicked green-grey water. What had made her do it this way, of all ways? But it was done.

‘I don’t think he said. Last week in September, I should think—isn’t that when the let is up? Blaize always finishes his books in town, apparentl—’

She forced a husky little voice. ‘—perhaps not this one.’

‘Oh, did he say something about staying on, this afternoon? I beg your pardon, Mother, I’ve been caught up in my own affairs—quite forgot to ask what you’d been doing—what did—’

‘Please, Julian. Will you let me speak?’

A sharp tone always produced that look of dozy acquiescence; it annoyed her. But then her voice came thankfully clear and free.

‘Mr Blaize—David—asked me to marry him.’

‘—and you—’

‘—said yes.’

His face opened into a dolorous grimace, like a tragic mask in cheap commercial illustration, she thought. The simile crushed the affection and compassion she felt when pain mitigated his beauty, as it had all spring and early summer. He got up quickly and went to the tallboy, placed his fingers on top of it and drummed them. When he turned back, he had composed his face into a horrible pastiche of felicitation. Since he could doubtless contrive a more plausible counterfeit if he chose, she could only assume it must be meant.

‘Congratulations. I hope you will be very happy.’

‘Thank you. It will take a little time to get used to—and of course everything remains to be settled. But I wanted to you to be the first to know, of course.’

Coming back to the armchair, he bent and kissed her cheek, and sank at her feet with the unconscious grace that made a bloom of anxiety unfurl in her breast. He reached for her hand—his face soft and seemingly sincere—but how could she tell? Perhaps he had simply chosen to act the professional instead of the amateur.

‘Since—since I’m to have a—step-father—I say, that sounds queer, said aloud. He doesn’t seem quite—’

‘Forty-one. And seven years, I think are the figures you’re looking for.’

He frowned. ‘No, I was going to say—never mind, it’s quite escaped me. I think women grow lovelier as they get older—look at your hands, for example, like tissue paper over veins of lapis laz—’

‘ _Julian_. Stop it, please.’ She withdrew her hand.

‘No—I’m sorry. I—I—don’t you think it’s time I knew what my father did? I mean, besides the army and the war. What’s the thing that you’re afraid he passed on to me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

His hand, on her knee, gathered and clutched a fold of the silk.

‘Yes, you do. Did he—keep a mistress? An actress—and that’s why—’

She wrenched away; he released his hold only an instant before the stuff tore. Her scalp tingled and her vision dimmed; she reached out to grip the chimney-piece, and kept her feet.

‘How dare you? How _dare_ you suggest such a thing about a man who was better than—’

She heard David’s voice say _He thought the love flowed from the sacrifice, and not the other way about...and he fled from his deficiencies._ She no longer had to defend Richard; she allowed herself finally to think it: he had known what he might be taking on and he had not the strength nor the humility to bear it when it came to pass. He had preferred death. That was an answer for men: it could not be—she had given it enough thought—for a woman, a mother. She nearly said _sit down_ , but he had not moved from his position on the floor. It was she who was standing. She resumed her seat.

‘I want to tell you about a man I once knew,’ she said. 

Julian fidgeted. ‘May I smoke?’

‘Yes—bring the box and the lighter over from the tallboy. I think I should like one too.’

She had not meant to tell him as much as she did, nor for it to be as bitterly reproachful. When she had finished, he took a third cigarette from the box and lit it, like a substitute for action.

‘He was a scoundrel.’ His face became yearning, supplicant. ‘But even scoundrels can love—’

‘ _Love_? If you think that you don’t know what it means.’ Had she been a village termagant or a slum scold she might have slapped him or bawled aloud—at least she would have known that she had feelings, and been able to release them. But early schooling in good conduct and long exercise of self-control had made her slow to grasp everything but the means to wound mortally.

‘You must know that the damage such people do is not confined to their own generation.’

‘Yes,’ he said almost casually, ‘I see that now.’ He took a shallow puff of the cigarette and put it out, a quarter smoked.

Elaine got up and went to the garden door. She set it ajar, holding the brown velvet curtain with one hand, and smelled the night air, voluminous and sweet. She heard the doorknob click, and the light sound of his thin-soled shoes on the floorboards turn to a resonant tread on the hall-tiles.


	12. Chapter 12

‘Hilary—’ Lisa came to the sitting-room door with the thoughtful look that was her equivalent of agitation. ‘David’s on the telephone—he wants to speak to you.’ 

Seeing Hilary start, she flared her nostrils minutely and added, ‘David Blaize. He’s not ill himself, but said he thinks someone might be in danger and oughtn’t to be alone—that was all he would tell me. He’s not at all an alarmist person— _too_ sanguine at times.’ 

‘All right.’ In the very act of rising, Hilary's mien seemed to change from fatigued to business-like. 

Lisa heard only broken phrases, scattered words. Hilary returned after a few minutes to the sitting-room and swallowed hard, putting her hand briefly to her mouth. 

‘Can you give me directions to Mott’s Farm? To the cave, actually.’ 

‘Mott’s—yes, of course. But—’ Seeing Hilary’s face, crushingly intent, Lisa altered an incredulous query to an offer of company as she drew a sketch map on the back of an envelope. 

‘No—I’ll be all right. I shan’t be on my own—he’s coming too. He can’t use his own car, that’s why—’ 

‘I quite see, my dear. It doesn’t sound like a job for a crowd. That’s a short-cut.' She indicated with the pencil-stub. 'It’s tarmacadamed, after a fashion: no need to worry about getting stuck, though it might be rather bumpy. Turn off there, and you'll find a lane where you can leave the car out of sight. The entrance to the cave is in the hillside, across the field. I think they have a padlock on it—but I don’t suppose that matters if—anyway. God bless.’ 

Lisa took her by the shoulders and kissed her, sensing uncomfortably she'd communicated more than she needed to of the gesture's origins in another place and time; Hilary twisted the folded envelope nervously round her index finger, then strode coltishly for the door.


	13. Chapter 13

In the porch, Julian lit a match. The key wasn't on its hook. He almost checked his own pocket, then remembered that he had dressed. Someone had come before him, someone was there, awaiting him. He was not, he found, at all surprised: this crowded day had shown him how truly inexorable was fate. Back out in the farmyard, he found that even the match’s brief flare had desensitised his eyes to darkness. He jumped as the Motts’ old dog stirred and whined. Nipper knew him, of course, but he might for that very reason bark a greeting. He hurried on into the field. The hill loomed in outline above him, developing texture as his eyes adjusted. He saw then what he sought: a fiery sigil incised in its flank. As well as he knew the approach, he had veered a little from the track in the dark; there were coarse clods and hummocks under his soaked feet. He ran towards the entrance, slithering on soles that found no purchase. Under the arch he hesitated: it might be anyone. The Motts may have imagined a disturbance, or local louts might be down there vandalising, or that vile cowman, who could have been the model for Seth Starkadder, playing a damn fool joke on some girl—no. The day on which the swart guide had led him to Her, as the first She was led away by his golden companion; the day on which he was proved, as he had always known himself to be, a changeling: such a day could not be crowned with bathos.

He descended the ladder and through the fissure. The passage was longer than he ever remembered it being; a tight band closed on his brow and he drew quick short breaths. He rounded the bend, but the first chamber of the cave was empty. Making quite sure, he caught sight of a dark smudge. It was the print of a wet shoe, too blurred to give a clue to the wearer’s identity. He thought he knew, anyway. The track petered out into the dry sand. He crept on, glad of the hard thud of water from above, which masked the sound of his step. As he approached the inner chamber he looked down at the ground, ambushed by the mundane thought that his precursor had been and gone, that he was too late. Reaching the arch, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, pressing his fists into them until he was meshed in the golden nets that formed under his eyelids, and inched forward to the pillar that concealed the switches. 

The voice that sounded then surely spoke no human language: it was Xu, or Chian, or Aklo letters. It howled and shrieked and babbled: more vowels than could be accommodated in any tongue on earth, then an impossible sequence of savage fricatives. But the timbre was wrong: grating, deep, _masculine_. The nets of light tore; Julian flung down his fists and opened his eyes, at first seeing only a blurred wash of ochres and muddy greens, the evil glint of the pool. There was a dark shape in the Chair and it was speaking English. He even knew the words, though he couldn’t remember from where. It wasn’t a play, not quite. _For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the rain;/And the veil of thine head shall be grief: and the crown shall be pain._

The figure stood up, stepped to the edge of the pool and looked down into it, draggled and jaundiced in the livid gloom. Sensing another human presence, he turned and looked over his shoulder: for a moment Julian glimpsed one dark eye, magnified as if caught in the edge of a convex glass, huge as a horse’s. He stepped forward from the pillar. 

‘Hullo, Fleming.’ 

‘Maddox—what are you—?’ 

‘Roughly the same as you, I imagine.’ Maddox wrinkled his nose, and moderated his voice to the auditorium. He must lecture pretty well, Julian thought. ‘From the other side of the looking-glass.’ 

‘You mean you came here to—’ 

‘Oh Lord, no. I’ve given it the consideration proper to my age and—inclination, naturally. But if you’re tempted to invest the act with symbolism, it’s a sign you haven’t thought it through, isn’t it? You might as well live.’ 

‘That wasn’t exactly—’ Though he still had no doubt of its ultimate verity, Julian conceded his mythos was not explicable, least of all to someone in whose expression primness and heartiness commingled to suggest he was contemplating inflicting six cuts for acting the goat all half. It was so difficult to make people understand, when they persisted in conflating _literal_ with _true_. ‘It doesn’t matter. How did you get here? I didn’t see a car.’ 

‘I must have come by a different road to you. I drove around for—a while, I don’t know how long. I wasn’t quite thinking straight. And then I recognised the farmhouse, and had a mad notion—I’d seen where they kept the key, it was easy enough, that poor cur should have had its honourable retirement in from of a warm range long before now. No reason. Well, apart from the obvious. In any case, I just do, sometimes, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, by whose countenance we steal.’ 

Julian realised how cold it was, how thin his dinner jacket. ‘Thou sayest well, and it holds well too, for the fortune of us that are the moon’s men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is, by the moon. As for proof now: a purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night and most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning, got with swearing “Lay by” and spent with crying “Bring in,” now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder, and by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.’ It must have been fairly gruesome for her to sit through, he thought, him playing the legitimate heir shamming delinquency when he was something like the inverse. They'd tacked on a couple of scenes from Part Two, to Malcolm's protests that it ruined the integrity of both plays: those must have been worse still. _If I do feign,/O, let me in my present wildness die—_ How proud he'd been of his _I know thee not, old man._

‘Bloody, isn’t it? Just how my luck goes as well. You should play him before you get much older. You’d be splendid.’ 

‘I already have.’ It was easy to say it, as if the episode of his life that had begun then had just ended. ‘I’d rather do Falstaff.’ 

Maddox shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t anybody?’ 

‘How curious you should see that. I say, what was it you were reciting? When I—I know it, but I couldn’t place it—took a third, I’m afraid—’ 

‘Swinburne’s _Atalanta_. Come on, before we go. I want to try something, on the throne, but you butted in, you damnable little scug. You can be my—my saki.’ 

Julian, for whom this appellation signified only the author of that bewitching story 'Sredni Vashtar,' made a gently querying sound. 

‘For Christ’s sake, Fleming. It means ganymede.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seth Starkadder: see Stella Gibbons, _Cold Comfort Farm_.
> 
> Xu, or Chian or Aklo letters: see Machen, 'The White People'.
> 
> Frank and Julian exchange quotations from _Henry IV Part One_ , act I, scene 2; the quotations Julian remembers are from _Henry IV Part Two_ , act V, scene 5 and act IV, scene 5 respectively. 
> 
> Swinburne's _Atalanta_ : _Atalanta in Calydon_ , for which Frank has a canonical enthusiasm.
> 
> Saki: pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916); Munro took the name from FitzGerald's version of the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyám. It means, as Frank (in his fashion) says, 'cup-bearer'.


	14. Chapter 14

They made most of the drive in silence, David Blaize being a person who fretted so seldom that he had scant art and no predisposition to conceal it, and Hilary one whose occupation so often required interference in the personal lives of half-strangers that she had no taste for it in her off-duty. Towards the outset she hazarded, ‘I suppose you have a pretty good idea that it’s where he’s gone?’

‘Yes. He left a sort of clue. Difficult to explain. He does—night-ramble sometimes, but he usually tells one that he’s going—except we’d had a fairly terrific row.’ 

Hilary, for whom scenes of demonstrative jealousy were relegated to a category quite different from the one in which she had mentally placed Mr Blaize and Mr Maddox, intensified her concentration on the road. It was necessary: the back roads that Lisa had shown her had, at this season, a dense central growth of herbage that threatened to undermine completely the incidental commitment to the twentieth century indicated by their crumbling asphalt. When they were very close to the sheltered track recommended as a parking place, he said abruptly, ‘I say, I'm not awfully good in confined spaces. If I get a bit worked up, just ignore it, will you?’ 

Hilary glanced to her left with a grin. ‘If you’ll return the favour.’ Instead of his eye she caught the ghastly ivory mask of his reflection in the windscreen. 

She took the big garage torch, but its illumination proved as much handicap as aid. Its dazzle, as much as their disquiet, accounted for their oversight of a decade-old MG Midget pulled up thirty yards further down the lane. To Hilary it would have meant little anyway. After blundering buffoonishly in the field for some minutes they turned off the torch and accustomed their eyes—the waning moon, half-obscured by cloud, wasn’t much use. 

‘There.’ His extended arm, a shadow against shadow, pointed to an unearthly gamma of light in the hillside. 

‘Someone’s there, anyway.’ Whatever awaited them, there and at this time of night, Hilary knew must be horrible. She started to walk towards it across the hummocks and clumps, glad of her stout soles. 

Deciding that bravado might serve her well, at the door she offered, ‘Shall I go first?’ Only a woman as gravely disadvantaged as she by conversancy with the manners of a housemen’s common room could have failed to conclude from the absence of gallant dissension exactly what sort of a case she had on her hands. The door opened onto a rickety ladder. At least no-one was waiting at the bottom to see her in unprepossessing foreshortened view, she thought wanly, and, giving the torch to her companion, descended. 

In the tiny circular vestibule at the base of the ladder, it became horrifyingly clear what was next: behind a large boulder lay a fissure about three-quarters the width of a man; a sickly brownish glow betokened artificial light at some point along or beyond it. She turned back; his face was waxen and the torch-beam shook, but he nodded. They did not really need the light, but she judged it offered more in encouragement than it presented in risk, and let him hang on to it. She remembered that the cave was a sort of show-place, and began to say something hearteningly dismissive about the suitability of such a strait gate to admit galumphing conducted parties, but only an inarticulate guttural sound was forthcoming from her dry throat; she turned it into a cough and edged around the boulder. It was of those tourists that she tried to think as her chest constricted and her head thumped: the passage could not be all that long, otherwise the tours would take all day. They were perhaps fifty feet down it when he snatched her upper arm—at first she thought to preserve her from some hazard she’d missed, which forestalled outraged exclamation. In the harsh, focussed underlight from the torch, his face looked like it was coated with damp plaster. 

‘Sh. Did you hear that?’ 

‘What?’ 

‘It’s the alarm—I think it’s the alarm. Can you hear it? I can’t hear a damned thing for th—’ 

‘Alarm?’ 

‘Gas, you imbecile.’ The word seeped into her lungs: there seemed already less oxygen to breathe. ‘The gong’s ringing, I’m sure of it—though how the hell we’re supposed to hear it over that infernal bloody din is beyond me—’ His grip loosened, though insufficiently for her to pull away, and he sobbed for breath. She remembered her words of a couple of hours before— _I think I could control it if necessary_ —well, this—this was _necessary_. She took a deep gulp of dank, calcified air. 

'Look—if you need to we can we can go back—' 

'Back where? Have you got softening of the brain or something?' he snarled. 'I'll forget you said it. Don't let me hear any fucking rot of that sort again.' 

Then she understood, stupidly, belatedly, where he was, where she had brought him. She had been to lectures, of course, read papers. It was not her training, however, that now suggested a course of action, but scattered chat with gardeners, college servants and hospital porters, people who had coaxed and borne along their shattered fellows and officers, who had been coaxed and borne along themselves. (Never from conversation with her brothers, though—before Christopher was killed she had been too young; afterwards, and ever since, they had confined themselves to farcical anecdote.) Feeling unutterably silly, she employed a verbatim phrase from the interminable monologue of Matty Bright, odd-man to her parents and a few neighbouring households, a creature ageless as he was toothless, with, it seemed, a sizeable dash of mustelid in his family history. It provoked incredulity at her sense of direction, then the slow appearance of clarity. 

By the time they had come into a chamber whose walls teemed with hideous animate-looking rock formations, she was no longer sure she had not conjured the whole thing from her own panic, and replied to his diffident _I fear I forgot myself—I hope I didn’t say anything too frightful_ with a denial that might, after all, have been the simple truth. 

‘But,’ she said, ‘can you face going back? It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here—perhaps—he—came and went—forgot the lights—’ 

At that moment the chanting began: a sonorous grim monody, caught by the echo and whisked up into the vault as a banshee wail. Had it been merely wild and disordered, it would have been less hideous, but it pealed out in steady rhythm, compelling and commanding, the imprecation of a reprobate prophet. Hilary stood rooted to the spot, too scared to scream, unable to perceive where the sound was coming from. There was a swift movement beside her and a tug on her sleeve. She saw, then, that the string of lightbulbs stapled to the wall led around a bend—he was already moving towards it. She found herself thinking of Edith, who had the same propensity to escape into quixotic action from trauma, or perhaps just the same shade of golden hair. 

The chill rising along the steep, uneven path down to the inner cavern was explained by the gelid, malevolent pool that composed almost half of it. Close to its brink was a square scooped rock backed by vertical ribs of limestone like rugged organ-pipes. In it sat Frank Maddox, his sunburned, lined face set in austere, hieratic grief, basalt in this limestone landscape. Crouched on some lower projection of the rock, his arms flung across Maddox’s knees and his head resting on them, was the Fleming boy. Skirting so close to obscenity, the posture attained an almost inhuman puremindedness. Maddox was speaking, in a clear, harmonious voice impossible to credit as the same that had produced the monstrous brawl in the outer chamber. At first Hilary could hear only the counterpoint between his words and the steely chime of dripping water, but gradually they coalesced into meaning and familiarity. 

> Alas, that neither moon nor snow nor dew  
>  Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,  
>  Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,  
>  Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease;  
>  Till time wax faint in all his periods;  
>  Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,  
>  And lay, to slake and satiate me all through,  
>  Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew,  
>  And shed around and over and under me  
>  Thick darkness and the insuperable sea.

This had none of the actor’s ingratiating attempt to characterise which made Hilary reach for the dial when a programme of poetry came on the wireless: it was violently impersonal, carried wholly by heroic metre and rhyme, with the result that she could believe him Sappho as easily she had believed herself the same at fifteen. 

He touched the boy’s hair in a light request for release, stood down from the seat, and with a decision only magnified by stiffness of gait, walked over to where David stood, pallid and quaking, his face damp, probably with sweat. He put his unbandaged hand on David’s shoulder, a gesture no more intimate than that given by a returning batsman to the next man in, and yet so private that Hilary quickly looked at the ground. The weird acoustic of the place carried Maddox’s soft words to her, ‘You ain’t such a bad little devil, you know, and I wish you would be happy.’ 

This utterance, inscrutable with the profound triviality of ancient attachment, poignant with an obsolete vernacular, David replied to with an inarticulate chuckle of understanding. 

Hilary was immediately overwhelmed by a sense of her own appalling redundancy. She looked up and into the grey, imploring eyes of the Fleming boy, and there being, at that moment, absolutely nothing else that she could have done, approached and assumed her throne. 

The noise of the water acquired, in the silence, deafening volume and piercing pitch. The three men were all looking at—looking _to_ —her. Suddenly intoxicated, she felt she could, if she chose, betray them all into thick darkness and the insuperable, the sunless sea. But the poison passed off just in time; after all, it was merely a discharge of the sympathetic nervous system. She was again simply herself, competent and wry-humoured, perched on a seat better fit for a nymph or eldern goddess than a person wearing crepe soles. 

‘This is a cold place, gentlemen,’ she announced. ‘Let’s go home.’ 

Astonishingly, there were no scandalised Motts waiting for them at the top of the ladder, no rubicund village constables demanding explanations. This good fortune they owed to Mrs Mott’s nephew (the clever one), who had called at the farm to announce his engagement to a young woman the whole family approved of, prompting numerous healths drunk from the last remaining bottle of a particularly redoubtable batch of sloe gin. Julian, knowing the terrain and its natives, volunteered to return the key; this was done without incident, and they took their solitary or half-solitary ways. 

Afterwards, when they thought of this night, each with the different degrees of mortification and relief appertaining to her or his disposition, they remembered it as one on which nothing had been resolved, but somehow, everything had been settled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the Western Front gas alarms were constructed from empty shell cases, to be rung like gongs. (I nabbed the detail from David Jones's _In Parenthesis_.)
> 
> Frank recites the closing lines of Swinburne's ['Anactoria'](http://swinburnearchive.indiana.edu/swinburne/view#docId=swinburne/acs0000001-01-i010.xml;query=;brand=swinburne).

**Author's Note:**

> **For those who prefer accuracy where they can get it***
> 
>  
> 
> This story takes place in an AU version of the first couple of pages of Chapter 6 of _Return to Night_ , in August 1938. 
> 
> With regard to the temporally flexible Blaiziverse, things are a little more complicated. _David Blaize_ (1916) seems to take place before the First World War, _David of King's_ (1924) after it. There is no mention of any character having seen active service. I find this an unsatisfactory state of affairs. My usual solution to this is to ignore the fairly desultory indications of a post-war setting for _David of King's_ , and assume that David's university career ends before the First World War begins, giving him a birthdate of 1893 at the latest. In this story I wanted to suggest a more significant ('significant' in the sense 'meaningful', rather than as an endorsement of early twentieth-century notions about gendered ageing) age-gap between him and Elaine Fleming. The canonically resonant 11 years proved intractable, giving David a birthdate of 1901, thus taking the action of _David Blaize_ well into the war years. I opted for 7 years as the other canonically important time-lapse, giving David a birthdate in 1897 and Frank one in 1894. This means that the action of _David of King's_ , which is alluded to incidentally in this fic, must take place post-war in this AU, with Frank and David resuming their studies after army service. David's claustrophobia is an invention for the purposes of this story: in _David of King's_ he merrily undertakes a long, pointless Tube journey for the fun of it. I hope readers will forgive these divagations in the interests of overall entertainment.
> 
> *not guaranteed, the management accepts no responsibility &c.


End file.
